Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm going to Playa del Carmen ( south of Cancun), on family vacation. Though I'll be poking around every chance I get,I will have one day and night alone and to myself and a rental car. Anyone been down there? I can't wait!
Thanks,
Steve B.

Well actually I honeymooned in Playa del Carmen so I didn't get a chance to do a lot of herpin' You can't throw a rock without hitting an Iguana though...so no throwing rocks, OK? Oh, and I had some sea turtle close-ups while I was snorkeling.

Have fun!

...so I am sure much has changed. After we did the sightseing thing at both Chichén Itzá and Tulum, we decided to drive to Coba, a partly uncovered Mayan ruin between them, in the area you'll be going, and couldn't believe all the wildlife we saw! Not just iguanas, but lots of beautiful lizards with bright blue and green sides/tails running across the hiking path, lots of tarantulas, a walking stick almost a foot long, clusters of 6-8 inch long black and brown caterpillars on the trunks of trees, puddles with hundreds of butterflies (appearing to "sip" the mud,) and snakes you wouldn't believe, including one so long that it crossed the one lane dirt road, we couldn't see it's head or tail in the bushes on either side. I wasn't a herper then, (I was mostly there for the scuba diving) so I am sorry I can't tell you exactly what I saw. In addition, they had a sign when we drove in identifying the poisonous species, and some locals said they didn't know of any that weren't poisonous in the area, so we observed carefully and didn't poke or prod.

I hope it hasn't changed much in the 15 years since then, and would be frankly surprised if it had. I just did a quick Google search to see if it had modernized at all, and although there are tens of thousands of sites devoted to the bikini clad tourists at Tulum and buses of old folks at Chichén Itzá, I only saw a few pages of sites about Coba, and it looks to be pretty much undeveloped. I remember that after climbing to the top of Nohoc Mul, you could do a 360 and not see a single road, power line, etc anywhere, and would love to have done that at night, to see if a single light was visible anywhere. The Webshots pages I just looked at looked pretty much the same (although they didn't have ANY of the pics of the flora and fauna I took. I still have them, and can scan and send you some, if you are interested.)

cindy

...14 and 15 years ago I used a Minolta Maxxum 9000, a good camera (for pre-digital) but I didn't have my Macro that day, or even my wide angle zoom, and only had the telephoto zoom. I had to stand far enough away to zoom in, and it was late in the day, and light was low, and that lens needed more than was available. I forgot until I pulled the album out just now how poor the quality was. This is one of the better ones, so I just uploaded it, but it sucks...

Not a lot has changed because I have 5 or 6 pictures of those same caterpillar "clumps", Man those are weird! I was in Coba about a year ago and it hasn't changed from your description at all. We didn't spot any Snakes but everything else you mentioned, we saw.